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Following a successful 2014 event, the dates for Dust World Expo 2015 were announced over on the official Dust Facebook group. The event will take place over the weekend of March 28 and 29, 2015, at the Commemorative Air Force air museum in Mesa, Arizona.

More information about the event will. no doubt, be released over the coming weeks and months, although if it’ll be anything like the 2014 event, there will be lots of Dust gaming, cosplay and other fun Dust-related stuff.

Makati Underground posted a quick update to tie a bow on the Operation Chronos campaign. The conclusion goes over the status of the three factions at the end of the conflict which was played out on the tabletop over in the Philippines.

Posting updates for Chronos in the form of fan fiction was a nice way to document the campaign, and hopefully the Makati guys will start up a new Dust campaign sometime soon.

A new sub-forum has opened on World of Dust for discussion of the Operation Babylon cards for Dust Warfare. It seems that the initial release of Dust Warfare cards from earlier this year is now being referred to as “Wave 1″, and the Babylon cards will be “Wave 2″ (not to be confused with the old naming system for Dust model waves).

One of the threads in the sub-forum includes a link to a PDF that contains the Babylon cards in draft format. Why not head over there and give some input on the new Babylon units before they’re printed in final form?

Clash957 has posted a new Unit Inspection over at Clash at Zverograd, this time looking one of the Allies’ series of M1 Light Assault Walkers, the Blackhawk. This walker is part of the FFG-produced Revised Core Set.

The UI features Clash’s usual interrogation of a unit, which includes a look at the weapons it has and how it works with other units, as well as a sample army list to show the unit in an army context and Clash’s personal opinions on the walker.

The fourth part of Shadowfall, part of the Operation Chronos story on Makati Underground, has been posted. Operation Chronos is an ongoing Dust campaign being played by the Makati crew over in the Philippines.

Part 4 features an Allied soldier recalling a fight against the Axis, and is actually a creatively-made battle report in the form of a story. Dust isn’t the first franchise to feature batreps like these, but it’s nice to see them written for Dust.

Over at The Lead Will Walk The Earth, Zombie Ad has posted some nice shots of, and a few words on some recently painted Allied medium walkers. The walkers have a mostly white-based scheme, which seems to be a slightly rarer type of paint scheme for Dust walkers.

Over on World of Dust, a forum thread was started on which units people tend to leave out of their armies, and why. Lots of units from all over the three main factions have been mentioned in the weekend’s discussion. That doesn’t necessarily mean that any given unit is a bad choice, but does show that there isn’t a “one size fits all” army in Dust Warfare.

Interestingly, although there are quite a few units that don’t see play, the Laser Grenadiers seems to be an emerging unit that more Axis players are including in their armies mainly because it can hit Soldier 4 quite well.

Do you agree with the units already mentioned in the thread? Is there a unit that people don’t take that you always do? Head over to WoD and join in!

Polyhedron Collider has posted a short interview with Joaquin Meier of Battlefront Miniatures, recorded at UK Games Expo 2014. The interview covers the games that Battlefront was exhibiting at the expo, including Dust, Flames of War, and Firefly.

The Dust section mainly covers Tactics, and how the kickstarter was doing back when the interview was recorded.

Makati Underground has published several new installments in the Operation Chronos saga, which is an ongoing Dust campaign (covering Tactics and Warfare, but currently in Tactics mode) they’re playing over in the Philippines.

The latest parts feature the journals of SSU Major General Timofei Teodorovic from June 21, June 26 and June 28; and also wave 3 of the Silent Puppets arc which tracks the Patient X experiment.

One of the more interesting additions to Dust Tactics/Battlefield was the new rules for captured walkers. Over at Wargaming Ninja Turtles, Guillaume has posted a couple of articles that focus on captured SSU walkers.

First up is a tutorial that shows you how to repurpose a KV-47 for Axis purposes, turning it into an Otto (basically a KV-47 that uses Hans’ weapons). The other post features a Natasha that, again, was brought over to the Axis forces, with some discussion and plenty of photos.

The UI puts the Achilles gorillas under the microscope and looks at how they function, as well as who they could function with which, of course, is only Markus right now. Ever more reason to get Markus released as a separate mini!

Unit Forward is two years old today, and to mark the occasion the site has received a new look! The old design has been around for a couple of years, and it was time for a redesign. You might recognise the new logo: it has been used on the UF YouTube channel for some time, and is now on the website itself.

One of the big changes is that UF is now responsive. That means you can view this website on any device and it’ll shrink or expand to fit the screen. A lot of people access this site on mobile devices, and the website should now look great on a screen of any size (within reason — a calculator might pose a slight problem!).

You’ll also notice that the slider has gone, and this ties in with another goal of the redesign: reduce javascript as much as possible. Although javascript is kind-of essential on today’s web, too much of it slows things down. Being lightweight is the key.

Other changes include a larger font size for body text, a nicer comments section and a general cleanup of some little bits and pieces.

Why not leave a comment for this post and let me know your thoughts on the new site? Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll come back soon!

Clash957 has posted some first impressions of Dust Battlefield over at Clash at Zverograd, in which he goes over some of the things he liked and disliked about the latest addition to the Dust family. His entry point into Battlefield was an Axis vs Axis battle including some colourful zombies!

It seems that Clash isn’t going to switch away from Warfare anytime soon. Have a read of his thoughts, then post your own thoughts on his thoughts over at his blog.

The Operation Chronos campaign continues on Makati Underground with more updates including Zaitsev’s Ghosts Week 2 part 1, part 2 and part 3, and Silent Puppets Wave 1 and Wave 2. The updates feature the usual mix of journal entries and prose.

Chronos is actually a Tactics campaign that the Makati guys are playing in-store over in the Philippines, and it’s nice that they’re documenting it, albeit in a slightly-fragmented way. After all, Dust fluff has always been system-agnostic.

Over at The Chattering Horde, Oliver (aka TheVoodooOrk on YouTube) has posted an update featuring some Axis infantry that were sitting in a cupboard for some time. So, recently he decided to get some paint on them and took some photos of the results.

Check out more photos including other units over on the blog. It has been a while since Dust was featured over there, and it’s nice to see it make a return.

This year’s Dust Warfare and Dust Tactics North American Championships will be held at Gen Con in Indianapolis, IN, on Saturday August 16, 2014. The Warfare tournament costs $14 to enter and the Tactics event $12 (in addition to your Gen Con badge cost), and both will start at 7pm. Yes, these are evening events, so you can enjoy the Saturday at the con, then play some Dust later on!

If you would like to play Dust Warfare, but you or your local game store (LGS) are having trouble with obtaining the Dust Warfare rulebook and campaign books, don’t forget the PDF option! The core rulebook and the FFG-published campaign books, Zverograd, Hades and Icarus, are all available in PDF format from RPGNow.com and their associated websites (DriveThruRPG etc.) The core rules cost $19.99, and the campaign books are $9.95 each. They’ll go nicely on your tablet or smartphone, and you could even print them out if you’re feeling brave!

In addition, the first campaign book published by Battlefront, Achilles, is free to download on World of Dust and features mechanised platoons as well as stats and profiles for units introduced in the Achilles wave, including those notorious SSU Steel Guard.

Although the core rules are obviously an essential purchase, some would say that the campaign books aren’t needed these days with the existence of the official Dust Warfare cards, and that is somewhat true. However, the campaign books do explain things like aircraft rules in greater detail than the cards can, so might be worth picking up if you’d like an in-depth explanation of something.

The second unassembled plastic Dust model kit has appeared in the pre-order section of the Dust Studio website. The kit features the Allies’ P48-C Pelican, known as Stormstrike in Tactics/Battlefield and Diving Dotty in Warfare.

This kit follows the Axis Jagdluther that was announced earlier this year. The Pelican will cost $58 including shipping, and should be available soon.